Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads Without Selling Out?

It’s been said (by Steve Jobs, no less) that good design is not just about how a thing looks but rather about how a thing works. But maybe design is also about how a thing feels.

The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”

Possibly such a view of Internet culture could be arrived at by way of deliberate study of online group behavior. But that’s not how Tumblr was made. “David built it for himself,” John Maloney, until recently the company’s president, told me. Marco Arment, Karp’s first employee, who participated directly in the service’s creation, put it even more succinctly: “Tumblr is David.”

I met Karp in Tumblr’s offices in the Flatiron district in New York. In his standard uniform of Jack Purcell sneakers, dark pants and a hoodie over a patterned shirt, Karp was polite, upbeat, inclusive and big on eye contact. Asked a question about competitors, he answered: “The last thing we want to do is compete with someone. That’s for bankers.” Karp likes to talk about Tumblr less as a business than as a “platform for creativity.” And indeed, it has been used to make more than 60 million blogs — among them a visual scrapbook kept by Michael Stipe; silly meme-blogs like Hey Girl, It’s Paul Ryan; and the clever graphic analysis that became the recent book “I Love Charts” — drawing a combined 17.5 billion page views a month.

The trick is making page views equal money. “Pretty much every large tech company today,” Karp said, is essentially “metrics driven.” Google, Twitter, Facebook: they’re obsessed with “optimizing” services, design, functionality and aesthetics through constant testing and tweaking. That ability to optimize and (not incidentally) monetize user experiences by reacting to microlevel data is the essence of Web-business magic, as it is generally understood.

Karp chose not to operate that way. Rather than monetizing clicks, he wants advertisers to view Tumblr as a place to promote particularly creative campaigns to an audience whose attention is worth paying for. It’s an approach that may or may not guide Tumblr into the black. But Karp isn’t worried. His nice-young-man aspect makes it easy to miss the brashness of what he is saying: he isn’t interested in competing, but not because he doesn’t like competition. He just feels that he sees something everyone else has missed.

Trying to blog at first made David Karp feel bad: that big, empty text box seemed to demand a lot of carefully constructed words, an intimidating sight for a nonwriter. The first iteration of Tumblr was a tool for “tumblelogging” (a short-form variation on blogging) designed to make it easier and less off-putting. It was released in 2007, and Tech Crunch promptly praised its simplicity: “There is absolutely no learning curve.”

Like any blogging tool, Tumblr allows users to design a site from a behind-the-scenes “dashboard,” where you type a post or upload a photo, and choose a visual “theme.” Tumblr’s dashboard incorporates some familiar elements of social Web services: in addition to making your own posts, you can “follow” or appreciate those of other Tumblr users. You can repost images and other content onto your own blog easily, and this helped Tumblr develop a reputation as a more visually oriented, multimedia version of Twitter.

In the beginning, most traffic came to Tumblr from without; but now more than 70 percent of the traffic on Tumblr occurs in the dashboard zone, where users read, react to and repurpose one another’s posts. The upshot is “the mullet theory of social software design,” summarizes Chris Muscarella, a tech-entrepreneur friend of Karp’s. “It’s all business in the front: you have your blog that looks like any other blog, although usually prettier. And then the real party is in the back, through the social interaction on the dashboard.”

The features Tumblr eliminates are as important to the way it feels as those it adopts. Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, an early Tumblr investor who sits on its board, says that it is “normal behavior” for a founder to be excited about adding new bells and whistles, but Karp seems excited about doing the opposite: “He’ll tell us, ‘Hey, got a new version coming up — and I took four features out!’ ”

Karp’s thinking about the comments section, which is generally assumed to be a core blog feature, helps illustrate his broader ideas about how design shapes behavior online. Typically, a YouTube video or blog post or article on a newspaper’s site is the dominant object, with comments strewed below it, buried like so much garbage. Thus many commenters feel they must scream to be noticed, and do so in all caps, profanely and with maximum hyperbole. This, Karp argues, brings out the worst in people, so Tumblr’s design does not include a comments section.

How, then, to encourage feedback while discouraging drive-by hecklers who make you never want to post again? First, Karp notes, you can comment on someone else’s post, by reblogging it and adding your reaction. But that reaction appears on your Tumblr, not the one you’re commenting on. “So if you’re going to be a jerk, you’re looking like a jerk in your own space, and my space is still pristine,” Karp explains. This makes for a thoughtful network and encourages expression and, ultimately, creativity. “That’s how you can design to make a community more positive.”

Karp is even more expansive in his claims for the emotional goals for Tumblr’s design. To express approval without reblogging, users click a heart icon. It’s easy and upbeat, and replaces the “garbage little OMGs and LOLs” in a traditional comment section with “much more orderly little hearts,” he says. (This feature on Tumblr slightly predates “liking” on Facebook, and a semiotics thesis could be written on the communicative implications of the thumbs up vs. the heart.)

When he explains Tumblr, Karp breaks its users into three groups. The first is, he concedes, the smallest, but it’s the one he emphasizes the most: the “creators,” who post their own photographs, original writing and so on. Then there are the “curators,” who cull, heart and reblog the best of this material for the benefit of the biggest group, the “consumers.” In reality, a lot of what is curated and consumed on Tumblr originated elsewhere, but at least some of it was made on the platform. This, Karp argues, makes Tumblr distinct from, say, Pinterest, the lately hot service that is associated with gathering and highlighting material from around the Web. (Not that Karp sees Pinterest as competition. He says that a lot of what’s on Pinterest comes from Tumblr and helps drive his traffic.) More to the point, Karp asserts that Tumblr was built for creative people to create things, and for those more interested in sharing or discovering. It’s a system built for positive reinforcement: “Everybody loves everybody,” he concludes, “through the chain.”

Karp is the kind of New Yorker who is so conditioned to the orderly street grid of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he grew up, that he finds the West Village a little disorienting. His mother teaches science at the progressive Calhoun School, and his father is a composer for television and film. (They separated when Karp was 17.) He has a younger brother, Kevin, who studies literature at SUNY Stony Brook. As a kid, Karp was interested in technology, but until the end of the summer after his freshman year at Bronx Science, one of the city’s more prestigious public schools, nothing really distinguished his experience.

The change began with an act of empathy. Karp was fooling around on his computer one day when his mother came into his room and asked how he was feeling about going back to school. Actually she knew the answer, and he knew that she knew. He hadn’t been particularly engaged with his classes, his teachers or his fellow students, but he couldn’t get enough of the internship he worked at all summer. Still, he was surprised at what she said next: Perhaps he would prefer not to go back at all and instead be home-schooled and (more crucially) continue the internship.

Photo

David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, and his dog, Clark. GPOY (Gratuitous Picture of Yourself) is a popular Tumblr tag.Credit
Photo illustration by Clang. Set design: Cindy Sandmann.

The internship was at Frederator Studios, an animation production company partly focused on the Web and founded by Fred Seibert, a veteran of MTV and Hanna-Barbera. Seibert’s children went to Calhoun, and his wife was friendly with Karp’s mother. “He was a typical 15-year-old,” Seibert recalls. “He couldn’t quite look you in the eye.” The exception: His fluency talking to Frederator’s coders and engineers. Seibert was impressed (even though, he acknowledges: “I had no idea what they were talking about. None”). When an entrepreneur named John Maloney sought technical help with his start-up, UrbanBaby.com, a Frederator employee recommended Karp. The project had to be done in a couple of days; Karp did it in four hours. Maloney made him UrbanBaby’s head of product and gave him a bit of equity. He was 16.

Karp never got around to earning a high-school diploma. CNET bought UrbanBaby, and Karp started his own company, Davidville, envisioning a mix of client work and original products. He put an ad on Craigslist seeking another engineer. “What do I do when someone actually responds to this thing?” he recalls worrying. “I have to, like, meet this person.” He persuaded Seibert to join him when he interviewed Marco Arment, the engineer who applied.

Arment, just two years out of college, was slightly confused about who his boss would be, but he chose Davidville over an offer from Bloomberg. During a weeklong lull in client work, they decided to build the tumblelogging tool that Karp had dreamed up, replacing the features on the traditional blogging dashboard with six big buttons illustrated with task-specific icons (text, photo, video, link, quote and dialogue). This ancillary project took on a life of its own. Soon, Karp heard from Bijan Sabet, of Spark Capital, and after some initial resistance, decided to put aside everything else; Spark, Union Square Ventures and a small group of angel investors put up a combined $775,000, valuing Tumblr at $3 million. Karp brought in John Maloney, his ex-boss from UrbanBaby, to handle business matters while he focused on Tumblr’s design and functionality and Arment (who left in 2010 to focus on his own start-up, Instapaper) oversaw the knottier engineering challenges.

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Karp was only 20 at that point, but more surprising than his age was that someone who largely skipped the standard socialization process of high school and college would turn out to have such insightful behavioral-design intuition. Karp’s friend Chris Muscarella suggests that because Karp never had that familiar experience, “he has very little notion of what it means to be a conformist” or to measure his thinking against abstract conventional wisdom.

Karp did operate in social contexts, of course. He grew up on the early Internet and fondly recalls the chat rooms and messaging and games from the period “when AOL was really in its prime.” He also learned early how to interact with adults like a peer. But he gives the most credit to his parents, as unconditional “enablers.” His father, Michael Karp, exposed him to a variety of geeky gadgetry at a young age and prodded him to pursue the Seibert internship. And I was more than a little surprised at how many people insisted that I needed to meet his mother, Barbara Ackerman.

When I did meet her, Ackerman greeted me with a hug, and we walked to a pizza place in the Upper West Side neighborhood where she has lived since leaving her native California in the 1970s. Of course, she says, people have questioned why she — a teacher! — would suggest that her son opt out of high school. David seemed less social than his younger brother, always holed up with his computer, Ackerman explained, but uncommonly sure of himself. His parents could tell that he was far more engaged in his work at Seibert’s office than in school. She recalls feeling the sense of relief through her hand on her son’s shoulder when she floated the idea.

Karp remembers needing “a few minutes” to wonder about what he’d miss out on in high school, before concluding: “Yeah, it sounds like a dream.”

Like lots ofso-called Web 2.0 companies, Tumblr is now reckoning with the very banker-ish concern of figuring out how to make money. It has tried, over the last five years, to do so by selling tools that allowed users to snazz up their blogs or promote posts. But efforts like those haven’t generated nearly enough cash to offset its expenses — let alone justify the $800 million valuation suggested by its most recent round of venture-capital investment last year.

Shortly before Facebook’s initial public offering, Karp started talking about making money from advertising — which seemed to run counter to a declaration he made in 2010 that advertising “really turns our stomachs.” Then again, pretty much every social network chieftain, including Mark Zuckerberg, seems sour on ads until the moment they start making ads the center of their entire business.

Video

TimesCast Tech | Tumblr's David Karp

The 26-year-old founder of the popular blog site shares his inspiration and mistakes.

Around this time, I had dinner with Karp and his girlfriend, Rachel Eakley. Karp was reflective about how his role at Tumblr was changing. He had not, he confessed ruefully, “committed code” in about six months. For years, Tumblr was made up of a handful of mostly young guys who could knock out a site redesign and head off to lunch together, a small-enough group to fit in an elevator. As with many early-stage Web start-ups, the focus was on the product and the user base, not money. “I didn’t care how the bills got paid, or about facilities or H.R. stuff,” Karp said.

For a time, Karp popped up with some regularity on blogs that gossip about the social antics of young New York Internet hotshots. That ended a couple of years ago, when he started dating Eakley, who has just finished a master’s degree in psychology and is starting nursing school in the fall. They live with their dog and are remodeling a loft in Williamsburg. That said, his life is not exactly normal. He often commutes on one of his three motorcycles (one of which has a sidecar). When he talks about dealing with critics, he mentions advice he got from John Mayer, the musician, when they had an impromptu dinner at a rooftop hotel restaurant in Tokyo. When he vacationed in the Virgin Islands, he stopped by Richard Branson’s island to hang out. (They met last year, and Branson became a Tumblr investor.) Somehow he manages to pass along such anecdotes in a way that makes them relatable.

I sat in on the “all team” meeting Karp recently implemented as a Friday-afternoon ritual. I agreed to keep certain details confidential, but it was clear that Karp is thinking pretty hard about profitability. Tumblr has learned to assemble some data that advertisers want (and that it had previously not bothered to collect). Notable features of the meeting included a new system for measuring the effectiveness of various departments.

After a hiring binge over the past nine months or so, Tumblr now has more than 100 employees. In May, Maloney stepped down from his role as president. He and Karp say the move was in the works for months — a combination of Karp’s increased interest in the business side, a stronger crew of experienced managers and Maloney’s lack of interest in running an established company. (Maloney remains on the board.) If Karp is worried about taking on more responsibilities, it doesn’t show. I asked him if, given Tumblr’s significant burn rate, he was perhaps a little more stressed out than he let on. “For whatever reason, I’m not,” he replied. In the past year he has become engaged with the challenge of designing not just a product but a business. It’s quite distinct from the Zen experience of solitary problem-solving that is coding, but, he continued, “I’ve really gotten a kick out of trying to make running a company as Zen an experience as it can be.”

He seemed particularly enthusiastic, in fact, about advertising. That old quote about it turning his stomach was, he says, imprecise: It’s specifically Web advertising as we know it that he opposes. “The Web has mega-optimized the smallest chunk of advertising, which is direct response,” he continued. And that’s fine for, say, an online electronics retailer. But it doesn’t do much to enable the kind of creative advertising that is “intended to make you feel something for the brand.” That’s what the ad industry was built on, and it’s what people remember, he says: “Can you remember the last Twitter ad you’ve seen, the last Facebook ad?” And so, he concludes, there is a huge, untapped opportunity. Not that he’s interested in competing, you understand; he just has a feeling this is something everyone else has missed.

Karp has said Tumblr could be “wildly profitable” overnight by simply incorporating conventional online ads into the platform, but he believes that would spoil the community and the creativity that have taken shape there. His proposed solution entails advertisers’ being just as creative and expressive as Tumblr users. For now, that means that a spot on the Tumblr dashboard generally used to highlight the company’s picks for the coolest stuff happening in its network will include occasional content from paid sponsors. The first participants included Adidas, Calvin Klein and the movie “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” generating more than $150,000 in revenue within a month.

This strategy means a brand must use Tumblr and use it well — which, actually, lots of brands already do, free. In fact, Tumblr helped many of them do so — again, free — during the years it was more concerned with boosting its audience than with making money. Karp argues that this is a strength: “A lot of these brands showed up on Tumblr, figured out how to use the tools, created value for our community and got a response.” Now they have the option to “elevate” what they’ve created within Tumblr, by way of a sponsorship.

This scheme is not instantly convincing, given the degree to which it breezily marginalizes thinking that has built some multibillion-dollar enterprises and brought plenty of others to their knees. Online advertising’s highly specific targeting and measurable results are seen as its great advantage over traditional advertising capable of delivering the (unquantifiable) emotional payoff Karp is talking about.

Karp acknowledges all this, but points out that the emphasis on feeling over data is exactly what made Tumblr popular. Sometimes, he admits, his investors push him on this subject. “But I think I can make a pretty good case for — ” uncharacteristically, he stopped and gazed at the floor. Karp is rarely at a loss for smoothly delivered words, but now he seemed to be searching for something precise. He started and stopped again and then said what it is he believes in: “Following our hearts.”